Vetting the best content on email around the web this week

The thoughtfulness and real sense of community is one of the things I find most valuable about working and talking with my peers in the email space (c.f. the inimitable value of our annual Insight user conference). So I thought this week, I’d share some of the most interesting articles about email and email marketing I’ve seen elsewhere on the Internet. These links are 100% vetted. Give them a read—they’re worth your while!

The Triumphant Return of the Email Newsletter. “Today, there’s no better way to guide your audience through an overwhelming amount of content—and demonstrate influence—than producing an email people will actually open.” By Morra Aarons-Mele for Harvard Business Review.

Death by Spam: Lazy Email Marketing Is Killing Our Inboxes “Here’s the surprise: though a small amount of fraud got through my filters, almost all my spam was ‘legitimate’ email. It wasn’t sent by criminals trying to defraud me, but from businesses and causes I’d actually heard of—though most of it not given explicit permission and none of it wanted. I spent 30 days unsubscribing from around 3,000 email lists, systemically, tediously, using Control-F to find the ‘unsubscribe’ link at the end of messages.” By Cory Doctorow for The Guardian.

Email Is Not a Perfect Match for Dating Sites. “In its SEC filing in October about a planned IPO, The Match Group wrote this: ‘Communicating with our users via email is critical to our success, and any erosion in our ability to communicate in this fashion that is not sufficiently replaced by other means could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.’” By Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.

How to Send Email Like a Non-Metaphorical Boss. “For years, social scientists have used the Enron email dataset to look at social graphs and linguistics. In ‘Phrases That Signal Workplace Hierarchy,’ Georgia Tech’s Eric Gilbert applies computational lexigraphic analysis to the Enron corpus with an eye to figuring out how subordinates talk to their bosses, and how bosses talk to their subordinates, and what role gender plays in the matter.” By Rosie Cima for Priceonomics.

It’s Time To Encrypt Your Email. “Email privacy is broken. Working around this broken email system is worthwhile and it’s past time. Here’s how to get started with PGP encryption.” This tutorial series shows in a straight-forward way how to use email encryption to improve communication privacy. By Jeff Reifman for Tuts+.